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Syllabic consonants105or a syllabic consonant in the word-initial open syllable, e.g. balloon [b®l ® u†n].Similarly, the ban on syllabic consonants after stressed vowels doesnot seem to hold in violin [®vaIl ® n], vowel [vaU®l] or dial [daI ®l]. What seemstrue, however, is Szigetvári’s (2002) observation concerning therestricted distribution of the consonants flanking the receding schwa.Note that while the lateral can become syllabic after the bilabial nasal,the reverse order of consonants is not possible, that is, a syllabic bilabialnasal after the lateral, e.g. camel [kÏm®l] and column *[kl ®m] respectively.Excluding the fact that syllabic consonants can appear only in theunstressed syllables, 3 the immediate conclusion drawn from the data in (2)is that there are hardly any restrictions on such structures as far as theposition of the word is concerned. Thus, they arise in the word-internal(2a), as well as the word-final (2b) position. They can also appear as thesecond member of the word-initial consonant sequence or even as the firstconsonant of the word (2c). Furthermore, given the distribution of the syllabicconsonant represented under (2), it seems practically impossible tocapture the accurate context of the sonorant in question. Thus, althoughthe syllabic consonant is correctly predicted to occur in the place of theprevious schwa, the broader context varies dramatically. Note that the sonorantin question can appear between two consonants, e.g. arrogant[ ® Ïr«g ®nt], before a vowel, e.g. cabinet [ ® kÏb ®n«t], after a vowel, e.g. gradual[ ® grÏdZu®l], or even intervocalically, e.g. violin [`vaI®l ® In].While discussing the differences between syllabic and trapped consonantsin Slavic (see section 3.4 in Chapter Two), it was noted that theformer must be represented as a left branching structure (3a) in oppositionto the right-branching trapped consonant (3b).(3) a. syllabic b. trappedC V C V C V C V CCCThe left-branching structure of the syllabic consonant (3a) is confirmed bythe English data. This is clearly observable in the example of the formsunder (2), where the representation containing the schwa is equally possi-3As pointed out to me by Piotr Ruszkiewicz, a few cases of syllabic consonants in astressed syllable may be found in earlier editions of Daniel Jones’s English PronouncingDictionary both in native and borrowed forms, e.g. thank you [ ® ®Nk-ju] and Mbabane[®Ò«ÔmbAÉ ® bAÉni] where [Ò«Ô] indicates the syllabicity of the following consonant.